Category Archive: California

Saved Twice

JFK pissed me off. The lack of important signage would have been embarrassing in any international airport, and I was flabbergasted that you have to enter the US in order to change flights.… Continue reading

My Squirrel Teacher

To one degree or another, it’s been One of Those Days lately. You know the kind. Not that bad, not that good, weights on your emotional ankles that make you want to just… Continue reading

Interstate 580 has a secret

It’s one of those things I never noticed until someone pointed it out, and now it’s all I see. Every time I merge onto Interstate 580, where I used to only see the… Continue reading

Covid Questions

Covid, the Great Disruptor, is helping us ask questions we didn’t ask before. For example, we could ask “Wait, I keep craving a return to my old life, but how did I feel… Continue reading

Your daily (mental) covid vaccination

The sky is blue. In former years, that was a basic sentence for English language instruction. In 2020 it’s cause for celebration. Last week the Bay Area (and much of the Pacific Northwest)… Continue reading

Saturday night civics lesson in Oakland

“Over a dozen protesters arrested after protest turned violent Saturday night in Oakland.” A headline too routine to read, a story so familiar the news agencies barely bothered to write it, mostly posting… Continue reading

My neighborhood tonight

The signs appeared about a month ago on a corner near where I live. The work of local artists, each page had the face of someone killed by police, and their name. It… Continue reading

Thank you California

I have a New Year’s tradition. Always fun, it’s grown even more important over the past three years. When the calendar flips, I look up lists of Things That Went Right that year.… Continue reading

I’m living in a movie

It feels odd, living in the early scenes of an apocalypse movie.   The toxic taste of city-spanning smoke is a seasonal normality here now, as enormous pieces of California burn in the… Continue reading

Time in the desert

The tyrannical obstinacy of Time drives me crazy. The way it refuses to heed the beseeching of the heart or the epiphanies of the mind, only drums forward with the dictatorial egotism of… Continue reading